A round shield, a spear, a curved Spanish sword: the reverse of this denarius from Emerita is a battlefield trophy stripped to its essentials, and it was struck by the man who had just done the stripping. Publius Carisius, legatus pro praetore under Augustus, signs the coin in his own name (P CARISIVS LEG PRO PR), a reminder that in the new Augustan order a legate could still put his command on the silver so long as the bare head and full titulature of IMP CAESAR AVGVST occupied the obverse. The weapons depicted are not generic Roman kit but the gear of the Cantabrians and Astures of the northern Spanish mountains, whose subjugation between 26 and 19 BC was the first great war of the Principate, prosecuted in person by Augustus until illness sent him back to Tarraco and left Carisius and Agrippa to finish the job.
Emerita itself, the city that struck this coin, was Augustus's monument to the war: a colony founded for the *eméritī*, the time-served veterans of the legions that had fought in those valleys. The shield on the reverse is a captured shield, and the city minting it was built by the men who captured it.
- Mint
- Emerita
- Struck
- circa 25-23 BC
- Authority
- Augustus